


Rapture In Blue

by orphan_account



Category: Happy Days
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe, Bisexual Male Character, Gay Male Character, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period Typical Homophobia, Pining, Trans Male Character, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 19:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20363632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In which Richie and Fonzie don’t meet until 1968, Richie is a divorcé who writes gay pulp fiction on the side, and Fonzie is his neighbor that he’s definitely not in love with.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the Platters’ “My Prayer.”
> 
> Reposted after being accidentally deleted. Originally posted February - March 2019.

Richie officially moved out of the home he had shared with his wife for the last three years on a Friday in June in 1968. He had already moved all of his things out, and all that was left to do was leave.

Richie and Lori Beth had settled on Friday because Richie Jr. would be in school, and actually seeing his father leaving seemed like something that would be potentially traumatic to a small child. Mary, being too young for kindergarten, would spend the day with her grandparents. Lori Beth read a lot of books on child-rearing and child psychology, even though she thought most of them were drivel.

“If a man does anything wrong in his life, it all gets blamed on the mother. I’m beginning to think that every man with mother issues becomes a psychologist just so he has an excuse to insult her.”

At any rate, Junior and Mary had taken their parents’ divorce as well as any five- and three-year old could be expected to, or maybe a little better. Richie just hoped that years from now, they wouldn’t look back on this as the day that their children’s psyches were shattered beyond repair, and Junior started butchering women who reminded him of his mother underneath a bridge, and Mary became a bitter chain-smoking barfly.

Richie suspected Lori Beth felt the same way, or at least a similar way, because she’d offered to let him stay in the house after the divorce. Richie had been sorely tempted, but in the end it felt like staying would give Junior and Mary the wrong idea. They needed to get used to their parents being split up or they’d be disappointed when Richie really did have to move out.

There was maybe something selfish in it too. The house had been Lori Beth’s in a way it had never been Richie’s. She’d been the one who found it and furnished it and changed it from a house to a home. Richie had just been along for the ride.

——

On his first night in his new apartment, Richie slept on the floor because of something his landlady had said the day he’d started moving into the apartment.

Mrs. Arcola was a pleasant Italian woman who’d insisted on helping him get everything in, even though Richie already had Potsie and Ralph.

“You’re lucky you came when you did,” Mrs. Arcola had said while carrying Richie’s typewriter in. “We just lost the last tenant. He’s in a better place now.”

“Oh?” Richie had already had one eye on her. If anything happened to his typewriter, he’d be screwed. Moving out had already drained most of his income, and he wasn’t sure he could afford a new one. Plus he’d had that typewriter since high school; it had been a birthday present from his father, shortly after Richie had decided he wanted to go into journalism.

“Where did he move?”

“He, ah, died.”

Richie glanced around the apartment, half-expecting to see a corpse or a chalk outline or something.

“Where exactly did he...?”

“He went in his sleep. It was very peaceful,” Mrs. Arcola said. “But you don’t have to worry about it. I wouldn’t have rented out this apartment if it wasn’t clean as a whistle. I burned his sheets and got rid of the mattress myself.”

Richie believed her. Really. There was just something uncomfortable about spending his first night in a new apartment in a bed that someone had died in.

Mrs. Arcola reminded him a little of his mother, Richie thought as he stared at the ceiling and tried to go to sleep. Or maybe she didn’t, and he was just homesick and projecting.

His and Lori Beth’s house had been very close to his parents’, and it was rare for Richie to go more than a day without seeing his mother or his father or Joanie. Maybe that was the root of his - his problems: arrested development. He hadn’t moved out of his parents’ house until he’d joined the army, then when he’d come back he’d moved in practically next door. Heck, even his job at the paper had been something his father had gotten for him, right after Richie had returned from three years of military service.

(His...other job didn’t count. It was strictly temporary.)

After a few more tosses and turns, Richie decided that if he wasn’t going to get any sleep, he might as well get something done while he was at it. Maybe by then he’d be too tired to care about the tenant before him.

The apartment itself was nothing special, a living room and a bedroom and a kitchenette, but Richie liked it, even if knowing someone had died in here put a damper on some of his enthusiasm.

Richie had put his desk and his typewriter next to the window, assuming that if he ever got stuck writing he could look outside and get inspired. Or at least get distracted.

As Richie stared at his typewriter, his head empty of ideas but still refusing to shut down and let him get some sleep, he was almost grateful to have his thoughts interrupted by engine sounds coming from outside and below.

He got up from his chair and looked outside to see a dark-haired man in a leather jacket, revving up a motorcycle. A nearby street lamp cast shadows over his face, that highlighting his features.

He was handsome, Richie noticed. Maybe not handsome in the way that a movie star might be, all chiseled and packaged, but Richie found him very compelling to look at.

That was when the guy looked up, and there was making no mistake about it: he saw Richie. He saw Richie watching him.

If Richie stayed where he was, he’d look guilty. If he ducked out of the way, he’d look guilty and suspicious.

So Richie froze up.

The guy just looked at Richie, something unreadable in his brown eyes. Then he waved at Richie.

It wasn’t much of a wave, just a perfunctory raise of the hand, but it was enough to reassure Richie that this guy wasn’t going to come up to his room and punch his lights out. If Richie had to guess (and he had to guess, since he couldn’t quite make out the guy’s face), he seemed completely calm and collected and cool about the whole thing.

And hell, what did he have to be embarrassed about? Richie didn’t have anything to be embarrassed about, either. There was nothing wrong with looking, depending on who one was looking at and why.

A woman came outside, her purse slung over her shoulder. The guy broke eye contact with Richie as he and the woman kissed, and Richie’s stomach dropped.

He was relieved when they stopped, and the woman got on the motorcycle behind the guy. She wrapped her arms around his waist and nestled her head on his shoulder before they drove off together, and Richie was just staring at the rapidly dissipating motorcycle exhaust. Within seconds, it was gone. There was no sign that the guy had ever been there, that he and Richie had never shared this moment of - something.

Richie was overthinking this. They hadn’t shared anything, they’d just seen each other and waved. People did that every day. Richie needed to get out of his own head.

He went to bed - his actual bed, the tenant before him fully out of his thoughts - and shut his eyes and willed himself to stop thinking about everything.

Richie did not get any sleep that night.


	2. Chapter 2

Lori Beth came by Saturday morning a week after Richie moved in, with Richie Jr. and Mary. She and Richie could have met up and exchanged the kids somewhere else, but she wanted to see the apartment and how Richie was settling in.

The best that could be said about the whole situation was that Richie was settling in at all.

He had yet to talk to anyone else in the building, aside from Potsie, Ralph, and Mrs. Arcola, and he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since he moved in.  
But he’d developed a routine. Get up in the morning, go to work, come home, make dinner, eat alone, and write.

Embarrassingly, his anonymous neighbor had become part of that routine.

His first Monday morning there, Richie had been pulled from his bed by the sounds of the motorcycle again, and he’d looked outside to see his neighbor driving off.

That night, he’d come home, get changed, and leave. Then he’d come back with a girl, and after an hour or so, he drove them home.

It was more or less the same on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, Richie had started instinctively looking outside every time he heard something that could have been a motorcycle. (Potsie would have called it Pavlovian, because he rarely passed up a chance to remind everyone he’d studied psychology in college. He wouldn’t get the chance, though, because Richie had no intention of telling him, or anyone else. Ever.)

On Thursday, Richie had gone without looking outside at all, just to prove to himself that he could, and then he’d accepted that even if he could stop, he didn’t want to.

His neighbor never noticed Richie back after the first night. That was probably for the best.

Richie didn’t tell Lori Beth or the kids any of this as he showed them the apartment: the kitchenette, the bedroom, the living room with the couch that pulled out into a bed. Mary’s eyes widened in amazement as Richie showed them how it pulled out, the way they did whenever she saw a magic trick or anything else that wasn’t instantly understandable.

Junior seemed less impressed, even as Lori Beth ‘ooh’ed and ‘ahh’ed and asked Junior what he thought. He pulled his hand out of his mother’s grasp so he could toddle over to the window, where he climbed onto Richie’s chair and looked outside, hands on the glass for balance.

Richie was in the middle of showing Mary how the couch opened and closed, while Lori Beth feigned interest, when he heard the familiar sound of the engine.

From the window, Junior asked “Who’s that?”

Now that he had a reason, Richie was able to let himself walk up to the window and peer over Junior’s head. Something warm settled in the pit of his stomach as he saw his neighbor, followed by embarrassment. He didn’t even know the guy. He had no business having some kind of - of crush on him. If that was what it even was.

“One of my neighbors,” Richie replied. “I’ve - seen him around.” That seemed like the safest way to put it.

“He’s got a motorcycle.” Junior slurred the T, so it sounded more like “moorcycle.” “Where‘s he keep it when he’s not riding it?”

Richie shrugged “In the garage, I guess.”

The neighbor had driven off by now. Junior turned away from the window.

“Can we see the motorcycle tomorrow?”

“I think we’ll have to ask him first,” Richie said. Junior’s face crumpled, and Richie added “I bet he’ll say yes.”

He looked over at Mary, who had lost interest in the couch and was currently turning the floor lamp on and off.

“Mary? You want to see the motorcycle tomorrow?”

Mary stopped, frowned in consideration, then nodded.

Junior smiled brightly and allowed Richie to lift him off the chair and back onto the floor. He ran up to Lori Beth and hugged her.

“We’re gonna see the motorcycle!”

Lori Beth bent down and kissed him on the forehead. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”

She kissed Mary on the forehead and stood back up, adjusting the strap of her purse over her shoulder.

“I’ll come back on Sunday at six.”

Richie held open the door for her. “What are you going to do alone in that house all weekend?”

“I’ll think of something,” Lori Beth said. She pecked him on the cheek and left.

—

The next morning, Richie was woken up by his phone ringing. He stumbled out of bed, secretly grateful to have an excuse to wake up, and answered it.

His editor got right to the point. “There’s a strike at Shotz Brewery. If it turns into a riot, we want a reporter there.”

Richie was out of bed and dressed in ten minutes. Junior and Mary took somewhat longer, being tired, cranky toddlers, but Richie eventually got them dressed and down to Potsie and Ralph’s apartment down the hallway.

Ralph answered the door, face slathered with shaving cream. He opened his mouth to say something, but Richie cut him off.

“I know it’s short notice but there’s a strike and I have to be there or my editor’s gonna kill me. Can you look after the kids until I get back?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Ralph grumbled and pushed the door open. “C’mon in.”

——

When he got back from the strike (which hadn’t been anything close to a riot, Richie’s editor was just melodramatic) and went to Potsie and Ralph’s apartment, both of them were already waiting by the door for Richie.

Ralph spoke first. “Don’t get mad.”

“Why would I get ma-“ Richie stopped. “Ralph, why should I be mad?”

Potsie said “I was putting Mary down for a nap, Ralph was in the kitchen -“

“We turned around for one minute and he wasn’t there and the door was open -“

“You lost my son?!”

“It was only a few minutes, he can’t have gotten far.”

“If you’d been back five minutes ago he’d still be here.”

To Ralph, Richie said “Don’t try and pin this on me.” To Potsie, he said “Where would he have even gone?”

“He didn’t tell us where he was going.”

“Okay. Okay, we’ll just - you’re right, Ralph, he can’t have gotten far. Potsie, stay here in case Mary wakes up. Ralph, you check downstairs, I’ll ask around here.”

——

By the time he reached the last apartment on the floor, Richie was half-convinced his son had already been kidnapped, or ran away, or something, and it was pointless to keep looking. But he kept going, because if there was any chance Junior was nearby and Richie hadn’t kept looking he would never forgive himself.

He knocked on the door, and who should open it but the neighbor Richie had been watching for the last week.

Any other time, Richie might have concluded this was all some cosmic joke, but right now something more important was at stake.

“I’m looking for my son. He’s five and he ran off and -“

The guy raised a hand in a gesture for silence. Then he turned and called out behind him “Ayyy, your dad’s here.”

Junior was here. Junior was here and safe and coming out the door. Richie waited just long enough for Junior to come out before he picked him up.

His neighbor shifted so he was leaning against the doorframe. “Keep an eye on your kid, okay? I found ‘im on the stairs cryin’ his little heart out.”

“I was not, Fonzie,” Junior protested. He didn’t sound annoyed at all, though, he was grinning.

“What were you doing?” Richie asked. “We were all worried sick about you.”

“I wanted to see the garage,” Junior said. “Then I got lost.”

“I thought we were going to see it together.”

“You’re always tired when you get back from work.”

“Hey.” Richie ruffled his son’s hair affectionately. “I was looking forward to this too, alright? I wasn’t too tired.”

Junior paused before saying “I’m sorry.”

“I’m just glad you’re safe.”

Richie looked at - Fonzie was his name, apparently. “Thank you. For making sure he was safe.”

Fonzie didn’t say anything.

Richie laughed, more to break the silence than anything. “It’s kind of funny, actually. Because we - we saw you and Junior really wanted to see your motorcycle up close and I said we’d have to ask you first.”

Fonzie didn’t say anything for what felt like a very long time. He was lost in thought; maybe he thought this whole thing seemed like too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. Did he even remember Richie from a week ago?

He raised an eyebrow and said “Junior?”

“Richard Cunningham, Junior,” Junior piped up.  
He nodded and indicated Richie with a nod. “That make you Richard Cunningham, Senior?”

Richie nodded.

“Hate to disappoint you and the kid, but I gotta date tonight.”

“And tomorrow night?” Richie asked, even though he suspected he already knew the answer.

He nodded. “Don’t start cryin’ on me again, kid. I got time tomorrow. I get off work at five. That gives you an hour, give or take.”

Junior’s entire face lit up. “Can Mary come too?”

“Mary’s his sister,” Richie explained.

“You wanna bring the wife, too?”

“Ex-wife,” Richie corrected. “And she’s not here. But she’d love to come if she was here.”

“It’s a date,” Fonzie said. He closed the door, and for a moment all Richie could do was stand there, a goofy smile on his face.

He was snapped out of it when Junior tugged on his shirt collar. “Daddy?”

“Let’s go tell your sister the good news,” Richie said, maybe a little too quickly.


	3. Chapter 3

“Remember, don’t touch anything unless Fonzie says you can, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you mean it, or are you just saying it?”

“I mean it,” Junior insisted. “I promise.”

He seemed sincere enough. Then again, he’d also seemed sincere enough when he’d promised his mother he wasn’t going to bring any prospective pets home again. Then he’d put three frogs in the bathtub.

They ended up leaving for the garage around 5:30, because Mary had spilled her juice on herself and had to be cleaned off and changed.

They took the stairs down, Richie carrying Mary as Junior ran in front of them. He had been raring to go all day, especially as Richie had been getting Mary halfway presentable.

When they reached the garage, Junior ran in before Richie and Mary, shouting out a “Hi, Fonzie!”

Fonzie was crouched by the side of his bike, unscrewing something with a wrench and letting liquid spill out into a pan. He turned around as Junior came in, and stood up as Richie and Mary followed.

Fonzie acknowledged the three of them with a terse “Cunninghams.”

Was he bothered that they were later than Richie had said they would be? Was he bothered that they had shown up at all?

If he was, he didn’t show it as he returned Junior’s eager wave (albeit not as excitedly), before he looked at Richie with a raised eyebrow that indicated curiosity. Maybe. Richie wasn’t sure how to read the guy just yet.

It took Richie an embarrassing second to realize Fonzie was curious about Mary, who had buried her face in Richie’s shoulder.

“She’s shy around strangers,” Richie explained. “I hope we’re not interrupting anything.”

Fonzie stood up. “Just changin’ the oil.” As he spoke, he pulled his gloves off. His nails were surprisingly well-manicured, Richie noticed, and his hands were smaller than Richie expected. They were fairly callused, though, and Richie wondered if Fonzie did this sort of thing for a living.

He was pulled out of his Fonzie-related thoughts by a tugging on his hand. Junior looked up at him with big, questioning eyes. “Can I see?”

Richie let go. “Sure. Go ahead. Just - be careful.”

Fonzie tucked the rag back into his pocket as Junior approached him. He met Richie’s gaze for the first time that day, and nodded. It was only once and subtly enough that Richie thought he might have imagined it.

Junior looked up at Fonzie. “Are you fixing your bike? Is it broken?”

“Nothin’ like that. It’s upkeep. Stuff you do now so you don’t have any problems later. Saves time in the long run. Right now, I’m changin’ the oil. An engine’s got all these moving parts that rub up against each other. The oil keeps it runnin’ smoothly. Without it, nothin’ works right.”

Junior looked down at the pan underneath the bike. “That’s the old oil? And now you’re gonna put in new oil?”

“Correctamundo. I just put the new filter in.” He knelt down and picked up a plug. “But before I put the oil in, I gotta put the drain plug back on so it doesn’t just dribble out. Hey, you got little hands. Think you can get this back on for me?”

Junior nodded with all the vigor of a bobblehead as Fonzie handed him the plug.

He crouched down, only for Fonzie to pull him back up and hold out his gloves.

Junior tucked the plug under his arm, then pulled the gloves on.

Mary looked up from Richie’s chest as Junior pushed the plug back on.

Fonzie glanced Richie’s way for less than a second before he crouched down next to Junior.

“Got it on?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, now you gotta screw it in. And for that, you need a wrench.”

He indicated the toolbox with a nod of his head. Junior audibly gasped and looked back at his father. Richie nodded for him to go on.

Junior looked over the toolbox with something like reverence. There were at least five different wrenches in there, as far as Richie could tell, and after some silent consideration Junior picked one.

Fonzie hummed in approval. “Good choice.”

Junior’s eyes widened, and he looked back at Richie as it to verify that that had just happened. He took the wrench and began screwing the plug on, and within a minute he was done, smiling harder than Richie had ever seen him.

Mary began squirming, which in the language of the three-year-old meant “put me down.” Richie did so, and she strolled up to Fonzie, who took note of her with a sort of detached fondness.

“You wanna help?”

Mary nodded. There was something imperious about the way she nodded, so unlike Junior’s unbridled enthusiasm. It reminded Richie of Joanie.

Fonzie took a funnel from the rack. With his other hand, he popped open a cap on the engine. He then handed the funnel to Mary. “Hold the funnel in the engine steady for me, okay?”

Mary nodded again. She had to stand on her tiptoes to do it, but she managed to hold the position as Fonzie poured oil in, and for a couple of seconds afterwards, until Fonzie ruffled her hair. “At ease, kid.”

Mary walked back to her father, smiling in satisfaction as Richie picked her back up.  
Junior, who had been watching his sister jealously, asked “Have you had the bike for a long time?”

Fonzie nodded. “Eleven years.”

Junior’s eyes widened. “Wow. It must be real special.”

Richie screwed up his courage and said “James Dean had a bike like that one, didn’t he?”

Fonzie looked Richie’s way, expression unreadable, and Richie wondered if that had been the wrong thing to say. He was probably completely off the mark, it was just that bikes tended to blur together if you didn’t know what to look for.

But then Fonzie nodded. “Yeah. Knew there was something I liked about you.”

The compliment was so unexpected Richie was momentarily stunned. When his senses returned, he had to stifle a grin.

Fonzie pointed a thumb at the clock. It was five minutes past six. “Paula’s gonna be wondering where I am.”

“It’s time to go already?” Junior whined.

“We talked about this,” Richie said, even though privately he felt the same way. “Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” Junior said. “Can we come back the next time we’re here?”

Fonzie shrugged. “Ayyyy.”

“Is that a yes - ?” Richie started to ask as Junior cheered and said “Thanks!”, and Mary smiled wide enough that her dimple was visible.

“Okay,” Richie said. “We’ll just - leave. So you can get ready. Thank you. For everything.”

Fonzie seemed mildly amused by Richie tripping over his own words, but he was enough of a gentleman not to say anything about it as Richie herded his kids out.

As he closed the door behind him, Richie got one last glimpse of Fonzie, cleaning off his bike with a rag.

——

On their way back up, Junior asked “Who’s James Dean?”

Not sure how to respond to that, Richie just said “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”


	4. Chapter 4

Traffic meant that Lori Beth was a little later than she said she would be to pick up the kids. Not that Richie minded; it gave him time to get the kids ready before they went home for the week. With how excited they were, it wasn’t particularly easy, but Richie handled the lion’s share of what packing needed to be done anyway.

When Lori Beth stepped inside, Junior ran up to her and declared “Mommy! I got to use a wrench!”

Lori Beth hugged her son and asked, “Things went well with the neighbor?”

“His name’s Fonzie,” Junior happily interjected. “His motorcycle’s the same as James Dean’s. I helped him put a filter plug on and Mary put new oil in so the engine parts go smooth.”

Lori Beth looked at Mary, who was in Richie’s arms, for confirmation. Mary provided it with a nod.

“Sounds like you had an exciting weekend.” Lori Beth glanced sidelong at Richie.

“I was there the whole time,” Richie said. “And Fonzie knew what he was doing.”

Lori Beth ‘hmmm’ed as she took Mary from Richie. “Next time you come, maybe you could introduce me to him.”

It felt a little more pointed than necessary, but Richie didn’t dwell on that. If Lori Beth suspected something - well, there was nothing to suspect. Richie’s interest in Fonzie was friendly. Even if Richie was attracted to him, Fonzie was aggressively heterosexual and Richie wasn’t that desperate.

Lori Beth let go of Junior. “Say goodbye to your daddy.”

Junior ran back to Richie and hugged him tightly around the legs. He held on until Lori Beth coughed to get his attention, and he let go and shuffled back to his mother.

Richie kissed him on the cheek, then kissed Mary on the forehead, and then the two of them left with Lori Beth.

——

With his apartment to himself again, Richie felt out of sorts and unsure about what to do next.  
Part of him wanted to just go to bed and deal with everything in the morning. Another, more responsible part of him knew he had the manuscript to finish, and his publisher was very keen on him replicating the success of his last one.

The problem was that Richie didn’t really know where to start. _Strangers in Shadows_ had probably been a one-time thing, lightning in a bottle that Richie couldn’t catch again even if he wanted to. He’d been thinking about where it had all went wrong, back to college, back to high school, back to before then.

That was probably why he’d suddenly recalled interviewing his great-uncle about life in the 1920s, about his time as a DA crusading to bring down a mob boss who turned out to be an undercover government agent.

The whole thing had been a lie, of course, a ridiculous story for a gullible nephew. But it had been a good story, or it had had the bones of a good story. Richie found himself returning to it again and again, tapping away on his typewriter whenever he had free time.

Six months later, Richie had a manuscript he was sending to a publisher, a small local one that mostly published beefcake magazines and sci-fi novels with misleadingly sexy covers, because he was in the middle of a divorce and what was probably a nervous breakdown and he had to do something to keep himself sane.

The end result had considerably more gay sex than Richie’s uncle had probably intended, and admittedly, more than Richie had originally meant it to have. It was just that once he started he had been unable to stop; it had poured out of him, something Richie hadn’t even known he had inside him.

When he was done, he’d almost been relieved. Like writing it had exorcised something within him.

He had been wrong about that.

At any rate, Richie was pretty sure he only had the one novel in him. He’d started a second one at his publisher’s insistence (something set during the American Revolution); the books were cheap to make and surprisingly profitable. Richie didn’t like to think about the kind of people who bought them. Though he supposed that technically included him.

He didn’t have to do it, he supposed. He could call up his publisher, tell him he wasn’t going to write anything else. Get out of this while he could.  
Or he could go see Fonzie.

He didn’t immediately think of Fonzie; Richie’s line of thought was interrupted by the sound of a motorcycle from outside. He stood up quickly - maybe more quickly than he would care to admit - and looked outside to see Fonzie pull into the garage.

His date wasn’t with him. Richie was vaguely relieved about that.

He waited about twenty minutes - long enough for Fonzie to get back to his apartment and settle in - then left his apartment and went down the hall.

Fonzie answered the door a split second after Richie knocked. He wasn’t wearing his jacket, just a white t-shirt, and Richie noticed for the first time that Fonzie was shorter than he was by a couple of inches.

Fonzie looked at him expectantly as he leaned against the doorframe, and Richie remembered that he came here to talk. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” He remembered he had said the same thing earlier that day and inwardly cringed.  
“I wouldn’t be here if you were.”

“Things didn’t go well with Paula?”

“Things went great with Paula,” Fonzie replied, tone almost defensive. “She just couldn’t come back because she had work tomorrow.”

Richie shrugged. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. You’re the one who’s had a date every night this week.”

“How’d you know about that?” Fonzie stopped leaning and grabbed Richie by the front of his shirt. “You spyin’ on me?”

Heat rushed towards Richie’s face. “No. No, of course not, I would nev-“

Fonzie looked like he was on the brink of bursting into laughter. Richie trailed off, at once embarrassed and relieved as Fonzie let go.

“I can see you from my window.”

“I know.”

Richie nodded, biting the inside of his cheek to keep himself from smiling.

“I wanted to thank you for everything. Junior had a great time today. So did Mary. And that’s on top of you helping out yesterday. If anything had happened to Junior -“ Richie stopped, not wanting to think about that.

Fonzie let out a “ha” of disbelief. “Nobody here’d do nothin’ to a kid.”

“I know they wouldn’t. But five-year-olds are magnets for trouble. Once he tried to make his mother breakfast in bed and he somehow broke the toaster making cereal.”

That got a chuckle from Fonzie. Warmth spread through Richie’s chest. That was probably why he kept talking.

“They’ve taken the divorce pretty well, but - this helped. They’re excited to come back in two weeks, if you can believe it.”

“I can believe it.”

“Maybe you could - join us for dinner. If you’re ever free when the kids are here.”

Fonzie didn’t say anything at first. Richie wished he hadn’t said that at all, that he hadn’t come here, that he had just stayed in his apartment and done anything else.

“Yeah.”

It took Richie a second to realize that he had heard Fonzie right.

“Oh. Okay then.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I’ll see you around.”

Fonzie was almost smiling as he closed his door.

Richie walked back to his apartment feeling oddly light.


End file.
